The present administration’s report card signals incompetence. A catastrophic Afgan pullout and a stalemated war in Ukraine highlight the lack of ability in foreign affairs. These failures join the highest inflation and interest rates in decades—the border needs fixing. The homefront isn’t any better. Add a judge’s finding the government has joined with media platforms to suppress free speech. Several house committees are just one Joe Biden bank account showing receipt and dis[persement of funds from his son’s “business” from impeaching Joe. 

Given the administration’s sorry state, the Republicans should be reserving moving vans for their executive branch ’25 takeover. Yet Joe Biden is the betting favorite to win. The reason is Donald Trump is the favorite to be the opposition. The former president has a loyal following but has always been upside down in the national surveys. So long as they can run against a candidate with such a low ceiling, Democrats are in fine shape. 

As I pointed out, the whole Democratic coalition, including its media allies, has worked hard to encourage Republicans to rally around Trump with an unprecedented number of lawsuits. It puts the former president constantly in the limelight, sucking all the oxygen away from other candidates. The last thing Democrats want is for Trump to be convicted and unable to run, but with our slow-motion judicial system complete with appeals, jail will never happen before the election.

So far, the Democratic plan is working fine. Trump is well in front to be the Republican nominee. Anyone running for office would love to run against an opponent with a 45% ceiling.

The only problem with the Democrats is their ticket of Joe and Kamala have their problems. Joe is old and looks and acts feeble while the net is closing in on his criminal conduct. The blowup of his son’s sweetheart’s deal on taxes and gun leaves poor Joe naked before the world. The smoking gun is out there, and it’s only a matter of time before it surfaces. It will be sooner rather than later. 

The disliked Kamala has shown a unique lack of ability for someone in her position. Getting rid of Joe now leaves you with someone viewed even less favorably. There may have been a different plan all along.

Once The nomination is firmly in Trump’s hands, Joe suddenly decides not to run and throws the Democratic nomination wide open. A younger team emerges without the Biden Baggage to run against old, tarnished, never-above-water Donald Trump. The Donald leads the Republicans to its fourth straight election fiasco—a winning plan even with the Deocrat’s failures.

Instead of the undesirable Biden-Trump matchup, fresh faces are taking on the crude old duffer. This change will blunt third-party movements arising from the prospect of a 2020 rerun.

Republicans have plenty of younger capable candidates, but they can’t get traction with Trump dominating the news. Ron DeSantis is Trump’s closest challenger, but his sterling record in Florida has resulted only in attacks from all sides.

California Governor Gavin Newsome appears to be the frontrunner to replace Biden on the ticket, but his performance as governor pales beside the DeSantis record. Both are big-state governors who pursued opposite policies. On all counts, DeSanis did the better job. This contest is the one Democrats want to avoid at all costs.

Constant attacks by Democrats and their media allies on the Florida governor are the result. These have lacked any truth, but that hasn’t stopped them. The two most recent attacks follow form even though DeSanis’ Covid record is far superior to Newsomes’ and the other blue states’ leaders, but they continue to repeat. Florida had more deaths per capita but failed to adjust for age. Picking a short segment of the pandemic is another tactic. The facts don’t lie; on mortalities, economy, and children in school, Florida did it right.

The current attack on DeSantis may be the strangest of all. Florida commissioned a distinguished panel to develop a curriculum to teach the history of slavery instead of the 1619 Project nonsense. Reducing the over 200-page document to one sentence, “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” is changed by Vice President Kamala Harris to say, “Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it,” Echoing this misstatement, Democrats and their media allies mounted a full attack.

When asked about slavery, many people picture it as black people picking cotton or cutting sugar cane under overseers’ whips. The curriculum points out that enslaved people were resourceful and gained valuable skills. Some were able to put learned skills to personal benefit.

At the time of the civil war, the slave population in the U.S. grew from 700,00 brought from Africa to approx. Four million. According to the 1860 census, there were also around half a million free blacks. There may have been more, as just as illegal aliens avoid the census today, fugitive slave laws may have made formerly enslaved people reluctant to be counted.

Black and Slave population of the U.S. from 1790-1880:

We know more than one in ten blacks worked for wages or were business owners before the civil war. Whether freedom was obtained by manumission, escape, or purchase, having skills benefitted them. It made more sense to flee North if you had marketable skills. Of course, those freed from the Civil War with skills were better off. These outcomes are what the sentence in question references. It is a testament to black people’s ability to learn and apply many skills. 

Contorting a true statement to mean something else aligns with so many falsehoods perpetrated by the left, but some Republicans. have also joined in the frenzy. Chris Christie, Trump acolyte Bryon Donalds, and barely noticeable presidential candidate Will Hurd understandably attack someone ahead of them.

Tim Scott is the real disappointment. “Mr. nice guy” couldn’t wait to play the race card on DeSantis. Black scholars wrote the Florida curriculum, not Gov.Desantis. The fact that the Senator said, “Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and raping women.” shows he hadn’t read it. If he couldn’t spend the time to read, at least he could’ve had the courtesy of talking to the authors before savaging their work.

If he had made even a cursory inquiry, he would’ve found the sentence he reviles is similar to the College Board’s A.P. African American Studies course preferred by V.P. Harris and Democrats. “in addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tai;ors, musician,s healers in the North and South,” the A.P. framework reads. “Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”

No one can see a material difference from the one sentence causing the manufactured uproar. Yet we have Republicans failing to do a minimum of homework before using a falsehood to attack one of their own. 

By joining with the left in attacking well-researched history, these Republicans joined Harris and the Democrats on Team 1619 project. These failings support my contention some so-called Conservatives are, in reality, Big State liars. At least they’ve revealed who they are.

As an aside, while slavery was no comfort to the enslaved, their heirs may have benefitted. An American Institute of Economic Research study shows how much better they do than those in their African Homelands.

Even though I don’t agree with Gov. Desantis on everything, he’s shown the smarts and toughness to bring us back from an all-powerful state. The fact he is the second choice of voters for other Republican candidates means he is the most likely to unite the party and win the presidency. The Democrats know this and are doing everything to hurt him. Republicans going so far as joining Democrats in using the race card against him tells me they aren’t serious about winning.

Under the Trump banner, Republicans will come up short for the fourth straight time against the fresh young ticket Democrats planned all along to run against their preferred opposition. How can a party be so bad at governing and clever at politics? Simply the party of big government takes elections seriously. To Republicans, it’s a hobby.